British Championships: David Howell wins title

8/9/2013 – David Howell, playing with the black pieces, defeated IM Ameet Ghasi, to finish the round at 9.0/10 points (and a 2807 performance). That is one and a half more than his nearest rivals Gawain Jones and Mark Hebden. With one round to go they cannot catch him. In today's historical review we look at Stuart Conquest's 2008 win in a playoff between two 40-something GMs.

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A record-breaking number of over 1000 players are taking part in the 2013
British Championships, attracted by a combination of the beautiful venue
and the fact that it’s the 100th in a series stretching right back
to 1904. This year it is taking place in the Riviera International Centre
in Torquay. There are 23 different sections at the 2013 British Championships,
catering for all ages and abilities, but the main focus of interest is on
the Championship itself. There are 106 players taking part, of whom 33 are
titled players, including thirteen grandmasters. The Championship runs from
29th July to 10th August 2013.

Game of the day by Andrew Martin

To really appreciate how far the event has come in its 100 years,
one needs to take the opportunity to look back at some of the milestones
on the way – the great characters, the champions and their games.
To do this, IM Andrew
Martin is using his computer skills to pick out some key games from
the past and run his expert eye over them. Similarly, Bob Jones, local chess
history writer, is compiling a set of ten pages, each on a past champion
and one of his/her games. These will appear, one at a time, in the daily
championship bulletins.

British Champions & Their Games - No. 10

2008 – Liverpool

The Championship moved to the wonderful neo-classical structure, St. George’s
Hall, Liverpool, where they were celebrating being European City of Culture.
There was bound to be a new name on the trophy as not a single former champion
took part. In round four Stuart Conquest beat Keith Arkell in this game,
who in turn caught up by beating Gawain Jones, leaving the two (Conquest
and Arkell) sharing the English Championship but needing a two-game play-off,
which Conquest won.

See also

12/30/2017 – The "King Salman World Blitz & Rapid Championships 2017" in Riyadh from Decemer 26th to 30th. At the half way point of the Blitz Championship, the defending champ Sergey Karjakin leads with 9 / 11. Maxime Vachier-Lagrave is a half point back followed by Peter Svidler and a trio of Chinese: Wang, Ding and Yu on 8 / 11. In the Women's Pia Cramling has a full point lead with 9½ / 11. Watch live with Rounds 11 to 22 from 12:00 Noon CET (6:00 AM EST) on Saturday with commentary by E. Miroshnichenko & WGM K. Tsatsalashvili.

See also

12/6/2017 – Imagine this: you tell a computer system how the pieces move — nothing more. Then you tell it to learn to play the game. And a day later — yes, just 24 hours — it has figured it out to the level that beats the strongest programs in the world convincingly! DeepMind, the company that recently created the strongest Go program in the world, turned its attention to chess, and came up with this spectacular result.

Video

On this 60 mins video we are going to concentrate on a simple, very solid idea in the main line Scandinavian, which even Magnus Carlsen has used to win games. Black focusses on making his life easy in the opening and forces White to work very hard to get advantage – but it is doubtful if White can get an advantage. Club players are always on the lookout for effective, time-saving solutions and here we have just that. Accompany FIDE Senior Trainer and IM Andrew Martin on this 60 mins video. You can learn a new opening system in 60 mins and start to play it with confidence on the very same day!